git - Switching to another branch before commit

Question

I have a stable master branch, and began working on a dev branch.

Suppose in dev I change a few files, but then want to temporarily switch back to master -- in my case, to run the master code in a debugger to check some code blocks. Then, I'll switch back to dev to continue my work, but in the meantime, I'm not ready to commit dev.

In this case, I thought staging the dev files via git add src/modified_files* before git checkout master would do the trick. But when I compiled the master code, I found that I was mistaken (i.e. the modified files still existed, and were not swapped with the master files).

What is the proper way to do this?

Answer 1

> git stash

Use git stash when you want to record the current state of the working directory and the index, but want to go back to a clean working directory. The command saves your local modifications away and reverts the working directory to match the HEAD commit.

git-stash documentation

then, when you're ready to go back,

> git stash pop

Remove a single stashed state from the stash list and apply it on top of the current working tree state

git-stash pop documentation